Blur distance themselves from Olympics

Blur singer Damon Albarn has criticised the corporate and commercial domination of the Olympic Games. The comments might be unremarkable were it not for the fact that Blur have already been booked to headline the Hyde Park concert that coincides with the closing ceremony of the Olympics.

The August 12 show also features New Order and The Specials in a generation-spanning Olympics farewell. Albarn preferred to think of the concert as "for London".

"The corporate side I find a bit depressing," Albarn told the BBC. "There's too much of it. A lot of people see it differently. We're putting on another celebration for the official closure of the Olympic Games. But we're putting it on for London and people who hopefully want to sing their hearts out in a park. I'm signed up to the idea of regeneration in London and putting on a good account of ourselves; definitely."

The Olympics music organisers have already been hit by a few embarrassments. Apart from their faux pas when they tried to persuade the long dead Keith Moon to get back together with The Who, they were also snubbed by The Sex Pistols.

John Lydon claims organisers wanted to censor the Pistols, objecting to the pronunciation of the word "vacant" in Pretty Vacant. "Censorship mattered more than the content of the Pistols," Lydon told Billboard. "If you're going to be celebrating what is great about Britain, the honesty of the Sex Pistols is one of those things. If you censor the words of any one song, you're killing the honesty and I couldn't tolerate that. We didn't want nothing to do with them."